Suspect Shot by Paris Police Tied to German Migrant House

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An anti-explosive robot approached the body of a suspect who was shot dead by police in Paris last week after he approached a police station with a meat cleaver and fake explosives.CreditCreditAnna Polonyi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PARIS — The man shot to death by the police in Paris last week as he approached a police station with a meat cleaver and fake explosives was a petty criminal who used multiple identities and who lived in a house for asylum seekers in Germany’s most populous state, the German police said on Sunday.

Late Saturday, the police in the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia acted on a tip from the French authorities and raided an asylum shelter in the town of Recklinghausen, where the man had been living, the state police said.

The police said they had found several SIM cards, documents in Arabic and two kitchen knives. The man had apparently been living there since August, the German authorities said.

Uwe Jacob, the director of police in North-Rhine Westphalia, said at a news conference on Sunday evening that the police had found a banner that read “Islamic State forever” in Arabic on the wall of what appeared to be a communal kitchen.

Mr. Jacob said that the man, variously described as Tunisian, Moroccan or Georgian, appeared to have used “at least seven identities,” and that his true identity had not been established.

The man first surfaced in Germany in 2013 after living illegally for five years in France, and had been under investigation on suspicion of dealing drugs and weapons, and assaulting and harassing women, Mr. Jacob said.

Besides serving a monthlong jail term in Germany, the man had also been arrested in France and Luxembourg, the German police said.

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A photo of the slain man.CreditLKA Recklinghausen, via Associated Press

But the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, speaking to the iTélé news channel on Sunday, said he could not confirm that the man had spent time in a center for asylum seekers in Germany, nor that he had sought asylum there.

“It is an information that I cannot confirm, because I am simply not sure that it is correct,” Mr. Cazeneuve said, adding that news media should exercise the “greatest care” in reporting on the man’s identity and past.

The French police took the man’s fingerprints in 2013 when he was arrested in connection with a theft in the south of France, but he appeared to have lied about his identity at the time, telling the police that he was a Moroccan citizen born in 1995, the Paris prosecutor has said.

Several people in Tunisia claiming to be members of the man’s family have told the Tunisian news media that he had no links to extremist groups. But Mr. Cazeneuve did not express certainty about the man’s identity.

“What we know today is that the identity the investigation had focused on at first was not the right one, that he is probably of Tunisian origin, that his name could be Tarek Belgacem and that he could have stayed in several European Union countries,” Mr. Cazeneuve said, citing Luxembourg, Switzerland and Germany.

Mr. Cazeneuve said that the man did not have any known accomplices. The Paris prosecutor’s office, which coordinates terrorism investigations in France, said on Sunday that it could not comment on any developments at this stage of the investigation.

Mr. Cazeneuve, who spoke before attending a ceremony in central Paris that paid tribute to victims of both attacks, said that the threat level in France was “higher than it has ever been” but that its citizens were “more protected than they have ever been.”

He said 110,000 police officers and gendarmes, as well as nearly 10,000 military troops, were deployed across the country to protect schools, places of worship and other sites.

Asked about the whereabouts of Salah Abdeslam, the only person suspected of being a direct participant in the Nov. 13 attacks who is still at large, Mr. Cazeneuve said the French authorities did not know where he was.